Lies and Red Ink
by Zigadenus
Summary: Tra8erse and I were joking on Livejournal that Snape must have a fetish for grading papers, given the amount of homework he assigns. Having said that, sorry, this is decidedly NOT what you'd imagine given that background info. Morally gray, graphic (rating for a reason), complete in two parts.
1. Part I

_**Author's Note:** It bears mentioning that authors **do not** condone everything they write._

* * *

 **Lies and Red Ink:** Part I

 _Zigadenus  
_

Sinistra is about the only other staff member he can stand anymore. McGonagall on a good day, but he doesn't have many of those. And he's gone off her; it's a guilty conscience perhaps, for all that his latest indulgence was unintentional when it started. He tells himself that he can't abide her gentle ribbing, that he detests her crowing and fawning over her pet students' accomplishments. But it's not that, or at least not wholly. He does a good job of lying to himself, for the most part, but still: he always checks to ensure she's not in the staffroom, whenever he comes across these particular essays, before surreptitiously tucking them to the back of the heap, to be _assessed_ in the privacy of his own quarters.

Sinistra's alright, though. She's another breathing body, and sometimes that's enough. The isolation's been nibbling around at the edges of his brain of late. He doesn't sleep well, because it's too bloody quiet and all he can hear are his thoughts. They churn and swirl and swish with endless panic and recrimination, and he'd seriously consider developing an addiction to sleeping potions, if it weren't for their effects on occlumentic shielding. He's not particularly suicidal, not yet, and not like that. Just… tired.

But there's that last essay to look forward to.

It's Friday, and he's a bit surprised she's here; he usually has the staffroom to himself. He supposes that the rest of the staff is down at the Three Broomsticks; he's seen them there, and McGonagall used to invite him, occasionally, back when he started teaching. He'd been invisible and awkward, that time he'd gone. Better all 'round to spend the evening catching up on the marking. Because it never ends. Never.

The first few days of the week are pure purgatory. Back when he'd recovered from hangovers with more aplomb than his far-side-of-thirty liver was currently willing to permit, he'd approached the weekly marking with cheap gin and whiskey: a shot for every genuine moron, two if he caught a plagiarist. It had become apparent in very short order that this strategy would result in his untimely demise by alcohol poisoning, so he'd revised: a graduated cylinder from his lab, and two to six carefully measured drams for every paper that achieved a passing grade. There are few enough O's that his metabolism keeps pace for the most part. And in a stroke of unbrilliance, he'd decided, about two years in, to save the upper forms for his Friday nights. The quality was higher, and he could get nicely sloshed and spend Saturday recovering while he plotted what to inflict upon the little blighters over the following week. This, of course, left him with all the dross and tedium Monday through Thursdays.

But perhaps he is, at his core, the sort who goes in for delayed gratification. Perhaps Fridays have been all the sweeter for the promise of a quiet bender. And lately, well…

Here it is. Neat and precise and judging by the heft, a full five feet longer than it needed to be.

He glances up, around. Sinistra is tallying her papers. He carefully slips the essay to the back, and jerks his fingers away before they can linger. She's looked up at the sound; he ducks behind his hair and busies himself recharging his quill.

"You know, you could have a bit of a life, if you wouldn't assign so many papers."

Pity. He is going to have to cross her off his extremely short list of tolerable human beings. Maybe he could steal someone's cat for company? "Says the woman who is tallying her own."

"Ah, but I'm nearly done, and it's mostly just killing time; Gerard's working overtime, Mungo's is short-staffed again."

"Mmm." That was perfectly noncommittal, perhaps she'd take the hint.

"I'm serious, you're here every Friday night."

It appeared she could not. Perhaps his dead-eyed w _ould you stop_ gaze would make an impression.

"Why don't you, I don't know, find a hobby. Find a book. Find… find a lover, someone would have you!"

He shuffles his papers up into a tidy sheaf, and pitches his tone to arctic temperatures, "That holds substantially less interest than this conversation."

"Oh, come on now, don't be like that!" She's wheedling. It's nauseating. "What's your type, then?"

"I do not have a _type_ , madam." He is capping his ink, his decanter, and his graduated cylinder. He isn't halfway drunk enough to sit through any more of this.

"Nonsense, everyone's got a type. Let's start easy: Ladies? Gents?"

He glowers at her as he sweeps toward the door. Last word to Severus Snape: " _Everyone_ does not have a type. I happen to be standing here, asserting that _I_ for one, do not. Thus invalidating your naïve generalization. Good evening." He closes the door before she can emit any rejoinder.

He's irked, to have his marking follow him into his private quarters. He'd go to the classroom to finish them off, but he'd rather be someplace comfortable. It's Friday, after all. And he isn't about to allow Sinistra to ruin his Friday night plans. Nevertheless, the red ink his pen viciously hemorrhages across the papers is particularly verbose tonight. Here's a student who's an _incompetent wastrel_ , a paper that's _pure doggerel, and a waste of all efforts toward education_ , another that's _a prime case of plagiarism save the spelling reveals it's been written by an orangutan_. It takes more than an hour of this to put him back into a proper humour; his mood is mitigated only slightly by four A's (eight drams), an E (four drams) and Draco Malfoy's lonely O (he refuses to drink to blatant hypocrisy; his liver no doubt appreciates this honesty, even if no one else will ever know).

Besides, he's come to the last paper of the night.

He can't go so far as to say it was purely unintentional when it really began, but it was innocent enough. Saving them for the last – he doesn't remember when that started, so it must have been only half-conscious. He gives himself a moral pass, there. But not this present idiocy, stemming from that first time he'd scrawled an obscure citation at the bottom of the parchment, and those damning words _you might be interested_. There was nothing unconscious in that. He'd had to rise, and look up the volume and page numbers – plenty of time to have thought better of it.

He isn't certain what he'd intended it as: assistance or challenge. He probably ought to have interpreted the subsequent papers in some dark light – showing off, grubbing for extra credit, being obsessive. But he doesn't. Perhaps it's some basal kinship, because he recognizes that it's joy motivating the quest through dusty old volumes, the thorough analyses, the painstaking translations of international manuals. With one citation, it is clear he's created a monster.

Except that it hasn't been only one.

It's crept up on him, but he can't _not_. It's a dialogue, now. He tells himself he tried to stop it. Until early this year, these papers had a particular form: the assigned topic would be treated first, succinct and correct. But then the tangent, the real work. He'd started this year as he'd meant to continue: he'd written _This is a waste of your time_ , and drawn a bright bold X across the offending section. Admittedly, this was probably the wrong strategy to have employed if he'd wanted to accomplish a cessation – he ought to have applied these remarks to the latter half of the paper.

Tonight's is a continuation in a series of refinements to polyjuice. He'd made an offhand remark about the energy potential in protein folding, and now there are sophisticated models of threshold potentials and theoretical equations that take his breath away. He notes, almost with detachment, that his hands have begun to sweat, as he grips his quill too tightly while he checks the derivation of these models on a piece of scrap parchment.

The funny thing is, he _hasn't_ lied to Sinistra. He knows that people entertain particular obsessions, what she vulgarly refers to as having 'types'. Some find sexual stimulation in breasts, in buttocks, in the taste of secret places, in the lazy bedroom gleam of dusky eyes. All of these things have in common that they relate to another person's _body_ , and this interests him not the slightest. Lust, he understands, applies to physical attributes. Love is more tender, a slowly-growing thing, and might encompass personality when it's pure – he thinks he probably loved Evans, although he certainly never lusted for any part of her.

He doesn't lust for any part of _anyone's_ body, and certainly not for Miss Granger's. Nor does he imagine he loves her – he doesn't even know her. Both notions are abhorrent, not least owing to her identity as a student.

And yet he's aware of the insistent tightening in his groin, the hot flush beneath his eyes. It's so unwelcome, when he only wants to enjoy the clever hypothesis she's presenting here. It's been like this, lately, and it's deeply shameful. But it's secret, so he tells himself there's no real harm in it. And if he has perhaps – just once or twice – given in to stupefied fumbling under the cover of quilts and darkness, well, by Monday he's sorted himself out.

He casts his eye down the page, away from the compelling equations. He's out of luck; his attention is captured by the precis of her justifications, which segues into literature review. He approves of the slightly-manic obsession for tracking down errant sources that's clearly in evidence. Here's _Kurzeil and Stappens, 1847_ \- that's a heavy, mouldering tome. When you open it, the glue at the spine crinkles and falls as tiny, opaque granules, and little flakes of decaying leather dust the smooth wood of the table. There's water damage on the pages she cites. He knows them intimately, and this sudden familiarity is an electric bridge between his mind and what he perceives as hers.

His erection is pressing painfully against the front of his trousers. He shifts, rearranges himself, all to no avail. There's a muscle trembling in his thigh.

He carefully avoids reckoning up the remaining whiskey in the cylinder – he has no desire to know that he's not drunk enough to blame this on the liquor.

He needs to stop this. But his hands are traitors, setting aside parchment and quill, delving past the buttons of his shirt. His fingers, tracing through the sparse hair of his chest, are cold; his nipples tighten and bud beneath them. He rolls one, hard, between thumb and index; the pain is a jolt of pure pleasure, arcing down his spine and pooling deep at the stem of his cock.

It's almost involuntary, the way he rises from the chair, and retreats to his bedroom. He strips out of his clothing mechanically. The sheets are cool; he lets his head fall back against the pillow. He can hear the blood coursing in his ears. With every breath, the sheet draped across his lap twitches ever-so-slightly over the sensitized head of his cock. He tries to gentle his breathing, to empty his head of thought.

It's no use.

Phrases, citations, those damnably clever equations - they drop back into his mind, disturbing the still surface of it like cast stones, pure desire rippling out and flushing his skin, the heat of it radiating down to where his treacherous fingers have begun to circle the base of his rampant cock.

He groans, a strained, hitching sound, moistened by the sharp barb of self-loathing that lances through him even as he eases back his foreskin, teasing the sensitive frenulum with the edge of a fingernail. He can feel his heightened pulse flickering through the thick artery running along his shaft. The coolness of the night air chills the pre-ejaculate now freely weeping from his tip.

He admits his defeat in a growl past clenched teeth.

But there won't be any of these softly hesitant touches; the likes of such are not for him, and he refuses to indulge himself further in this madness. Pain, instead. He grips his shaft too firmly, strokes quickly, methodically, with bruising cruelty. He pinches, tugs, at a nipple; the sensation is a counterpoint to the damage the base of his fist is inflicting upon his balls, and it's chilling nausea now that's quivering in his gut, displacing those futile threads of sensuality. A few more harsh passes and he's there, that hot tight ache loosening as semen spills across his clawed fingers. He releases his tortured cock immediately, wipes his hand in the bedsheets with clinical detachment.

He is empty now.

There is stillness inside, finally, and he is almost puzzled to note that there are tears cooling across the harsh planes of his face. It is absurd, he thinks.

It is as absurd as lusting after someone's brain. As absurd as the fact that tomorrow, he will carefully seat himself in the wingback chair, and spend the better part of the afternoon convincing himself that this has not occurred, that he can trust himself to act the part of beneficent mentor. As absurd as the eventuality of appending to her paper a suggestion for an expanded line of inquiry, in his customary red ink.

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 _ **Author's Note:**_ _I always very much appreciate hearing from people who've chosen to read my work, and I'm thankful for any constructive criticism readers choose to give as well._


	2. Part II

_**Author's Note:** I have distinct suspicions that the addition of this companion piece cheapens the first work, but I've written it anyway, because people asked nicely – you may disregard it as fits your fancy. The appeal in writing was largely that it allowed me to exorcise two of my peeves relating to Rowling's disregard of _Actual Fucking Biology _(snake fangs would break off before they slashed anyone open, and venom coagulates blood). Science! It makes fiction better! /rant_

* * *

 **Lies and Red Ink:** Part II

 _Zigadenus_

The Defense essay is burning a hole through her satchel. It was all she could do not to unfurl it in the midst of class, but she is nothing if not circumspect. And so it is secreted here, flattened between two textbooks, but no less dangerous to her peace of mind for having lost physical volume. She forces herself to linger in the common room before bed, and make polite conversation with Ginny. No, she doesn't know where Harry is, she was in the library. Ron chimes in that Jimmy Peake brought around a note from Dumbledore, and everyone is diverted by speculations as to what the two are getting up to in this distant, nebulous 'war' with the Former Tom Riddle.

She eases out of the conversation; she'd thought to tell them what she'd discovered, about this mysterious Prince and his potions book, but on second thought, it's a delicious little secret she's just as keen on keeping to herself for now. Perhaps she can find a way to sneak into the Room of Requirement and retrieve the book without Harry knowing? She'd like to compare the writing to the red ink that's waiting for her on this latest Defense essay.

Except, well, 'Defense' is a misnomer in the grandest possible way. She'd only written one of them this year. It had been returned with an X like a gaping wound slashed across half the parchment. Since then, she's not bothered with the charade: he's clearly just as interested in reading regurgitations of textbooks as she is in producing them.

She pulls the drapes closed around her bed, and snuggles down into a den of pillows and quilts. She sighs, deep and happy, as she extracts the parchment from her bag. What will he have to say about her models?

She hasn't gotten very far when there is an outrageous din and clamour. The foolish grin falls from her face as the meaning of the shouting clarifies.

Everything is confusion, terror, chaos.

She will remember the strange look in his eyes, as he pushes past Luna and directs them in to assist Professor Flitwick. She will remember it, but she will never know what it meant.

In the aftermath of what she mistakenly believes is Everything, she looks down upon this crumpled piece of parchment. The compulsion of these crimson words has dissipated, the notes of the siren's song discordant and broken. She picks it up; there should be disgust or dismay, or _something_ , but all she feels is empty.

She shoves it into the bottom of her trunk with the rest of them, eventually convincing herself that she has forgotten that she hasn't read to the end.

It's another night, and the light is poor; the room is dusty and rife with cobwebs. He has fallen against a heap of broken furniture, and his limbs are twitching, spastic and progressively enfeebled with every shuddering breath. The venom, injected near the carotid artery, seems to have travelled swiftly; his blood is tracing out across his paper skin. The light is poor, but she can still see the colour of it; a freshet seems to burst from a tear duct, dripping across the harsh planes of his face even as she watches. It is like so much ink. She turns away. This is beyond her capacity, she can't be witness to it any longer.

When things are quiet, she asks Harry what he meant, dangling those mocking words in front of Riddle. She discovers that she doesn't want to believe what he tells her. Why _her_? But there is no time to untangle this knot of anger, this petulant confusion. The world is whirling away from her, escaping the grim control she's always applied to it.

He's left her his books. She thinks she's misread the notice. The words blur together in front of her eyes, and she leans heavily against Molly's kitchen table. No one, least of all her, really believes it at first, but everyone is eager to help her transport them away from the dingy terraced house. They want a peep show, a window into his privacy. She demurs, this is something she will do alone, for more reasons than one. She is there all afternoon, surrounded by the detritus of his life. At one point, she collapses into the frayed armchair and cannot move for hours. The sun wanes, Next Door is beating his wife, a dog barks. When it is finally silent, she rouses, ready at last to conduct these rites of departure, ready to dismantle all remaining reality of him.

She's nearly finished when she turns up the daybook. It has been tucked alongside _Moste Potente Potions_ , and falls onto the floor as she extracts this volume from its bowed shelf. She stoops to retrieve it. There is something illicit about the fine calfskin with which it's bound. And here's that so-familiar cursive again; she's unaccountably thankful that the tight, cramped lines march across the pages in lines of black.

She flips through it meticulously, twice, looking for some variant of her own name. There is nothing, and in the cold light of the clouded dawn, she can't convince herself there is meaning encoded in a lack of evidence.

And so she finally acquiesces to what seems inevitable, and that night steals into Ronald's room. The brass plate on the door reassures her that she hasn't been in error, in relentlessly identifying this fellow with his proper noun. She detests monosyllabic names; they are somehow undignified and too casual. And perhaps some parts of reality are under subjective sway: if she thinks 'Ronald' long enough, hard enough, maybe some more illustrious character will take substance and displace the boy who lights up as she enters.

She is going to _show him_ ; she will have revenge.

(It is only later that the absurdity of this spite – this illogical, burning desire for vengeance - actually occurs to her. She laughs, and it's a cracking, broken sound, echoing weirdly in the bath.)

If the absurdity takes a while to catch up, the knowledge that this is a bad idea is manifest nearly immediately.

 _Stop_ , she tells him, but he doesn't hear her over the way he's chanting an endless litany of "So good, _fuck_ Hermione, so tight, fuck, FUCK! Hermione, this is brilliant, you're so fucking _tight_." The fact he can pronounce her name isn't enough intellectual compensation for this reduction to a mere orifice. Especially as she knows she isn't 'tight' – not enough that _he'd_ be apt to notice. It's just that he'd gotten started before she's adequately aroused.

If he won't stop, at least he could have the courtesy of not speaking. She turns her face into the pillow, away from the sour reek of his armpits. Her traitorous body is finally responding to this ill-conceived invasion she's plotted against it, and his movements are slickened, faster. At least it's reduced him to wordless grunts and panting. Minor improvement; she grits her teeth and barely has time to work up a good head of self-recrimination before he's finished.

She's released from the prison of his limbs when he flops back into the bedsheets, a shit-eating grin wide across his face. "That sure was something, wasn't it?"

"I need the loo," she responds.

She leans against the closed bathroom door, surveying the hollow darkness of her eyes in the mirror. She can't shake the feeling that there's some integral part of her missing, irretrievable, lost. She's wasn't a virgin by the standard metric so it can't be that, and besides: this certainty of loss is something that's been clawing away at the quiet corners of her mind for days. And yet it slips away from her every time she tries to examine it.

Standing here fails to accomplish enlightenment, it only allows his ejaculate to exit her body. It trickles down the inside of her thigh; she swipes at it with a wad of tissue, suddenly disgusted by the biological realities of what she's done. She cracks her forehead against the tap, dry heaving into the washbasin.

She needs him off of her, in every possible way.

She huddles on the cold edge of the toilet as the tub fills, arms crossed defensively across her chest, fingernails leaving bloody crescents in the goose-prickled skin of her shoulders. It's as she's watching the water plunging down that she realizes she'll be marinating in a diluted soup of his semen. This untenable reality necessitates the soapy washcloth with which she viciously attacks her genitals, the coarse weave harsh against newly-tender tissues.

When she does lower herself into the bath, her eyes are dragged toward the incongruous yellow of a plastic razor. Harry has probably abandoned it here; she doesn't think any of the Weasley boys use these Muggle implements. It's the matter of mechanical moments to smash it against the bathroom tile with the base of a shampoo bottle. The little strands of sharpened steel glint amidst the wreckage.

She reaches out and then there are trailing crimson veils through the water and she surfaces out of darkness to find lime-robed Healers hovering over her and diagnosing her with post-traumatic stress disorder and – Here her imagination fails her; it has hiccoughed on the idea that wizards understand anything about psychology. She leans back into the tub, until the water laps along the sides of her breasts.

It is as she is carefully sweeping the broken pieces of this instrument into the trash that she finally catches hold of this enigmatic sense of loss that's been plaguing her. She'd been chastising herself: she didn't even know him. But it occurs to her now that what she has really lost is a part of her own identity, the part of her that resided in his mind, echoed back in marginalia. This realization seems so profound that she has a sense of being cheated when nothing changes. He is still dead, and she is still sitting here on the cold tiles, wrapped up in a towel, the cleanliness of which she's not entirely certain.

Things go on. They always do.

Ginny and Fleur unite in an expectation that her bridal flowers will be dominated by bright scarlet roses and carnations, gold-gilt ferns: a Gryffindor-ish panoply that they have assembled over hours of giggling consultation with _The Language of Flowers_. She plumps half-heartedly for roses deep as blood, but Molly won't have it. "My dear, this is really not the occasion for your gothic sensibilities." She has no idea what this means, but shrugs and goes out for a walk in the wind and the rain.

It's when she's consulting a book of her own that she finds a scrap of parchment that gives her something new to do. She's huddled into the attic of her new home. There was nowhere else to store the books, and Ronald doesn't want Snape's Things cluttering up the spare bedroom. Better that it sit empty, just a lonely white bed. She sleeps there sometimes. But now she's awake and energized, towering heaps of books on every side, a barrier behind which she is surreptitiously flipping through the object of her interest. _Moste Potente Potions_ is one of the few books that she knows contains a section on abortifacients.

The parchment is tucked into an early chapter; anticoagulants. He must have been aiming twenty pages further on (polyjuice), because the parchment is scribbled over in derivations of equations that are perfectly familiar to her, as if she's just written them yesterday. Along one margin are the hasty words _mention methylation to Granger; resolves? stability_.

And of course it does, she can see again the structures, and she knows, suddenly and with certainty, that this part of her she feared lost forever has only been quietly sleeping, resting in some protected place.

She expected, perhaps, a sense of accomplishment, when her copy of the published article arrives. She has opened it while standing at the mailbox; she'd requested it delivered through the Muggle post so that Ronald won't see it. She isn't sure she is capable of explaining why she chose to author it with her maiden name. But there was something necessary in the gesture. She traces her fingertip across the byline, hesitating beneath her coauthor's name. There is a little dagger superscripted there: _deceased_. No, she does not feel accomplished, but there is a sense of closure in seeing their names married here in type.

She breathes in, deeply. She can smell the rain-freshened earth. It feels like it is the first breath she's ever taken.

She tucks the reprint back into its brown-paper envelope, and retrieves the rest of the post. Flyers and adverts and the Muggle newspapers she still takes. There is a plain white card that at first she assumes is a business-reply mailing, but a flash of colour discredits this notion. There, in red ink, are the simple words _I have read your article with great interest_.

 _fin._


End file.
